Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real

The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s new book, “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” restores the primal force of a great old philosophical word, “metaphysics.” He starts with a boldly discerning look at that strange creature, mankind, and comes to some remarkable speculations about who we are and what our place is in the universe. Incidentally (and seemingly unintentionally) he illuminates, along the way, some significant aspects of the cinema, and of art overall.

The book deals with science—specifically, Darwinian ideas regarding evolution and natural selection—and it’s filled with the quasi-scientific language and argumentation that characterizes much of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. This is unfortunate, because the ideas that Nagel unfolds ought to be discussed by non-specialists with an interest in the arts, politics, and—quite literally, in this context—the humanities.

Where the book has been discussed, it has stirred up controversy, largely of an implicitly political nature. Jennifer Schuessler reported in the Times, on the praise that it has elicited from creationists. Proponents of evolution have, in effect, responded to it with a concerted “Et tu, Nagel?”: having spent their careers fending off attacks on evolution from right-wing religious creationists, they now find themselves having to defend the idea on, so to speak, their left, hyper-rational flank. But as H. Allen Orr rightly notes in the New York Review of Books, there’s nothing in “Mind and Cosmos” that supports or sympathizes with the religious point of view. Rather, Nagel is seeking to improve science, even to expand it, not to repudiate it.

Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what exists. People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them.

Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in his view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical:

subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness.

Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology—the concept of evolution—can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it—“an irreducible faculty.” He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.”

And this, he argues, would be a theory of teleology—a preprogrammed or built-in tendency in the universe toward the particular goal of fulfilling the possibilities of mentality. In a splendid image, Nagel writes, “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”

In effect, the universe tends toward maximizing certain goals and places “value in the result toward which things tend”—and Nagel assimilates this metaphysical tendency to human morality, which would mesh, gradually and incrementally (with backward as well as forward steps) with the value that inheres in the universe. In this view, the discovery of those values is inextricable from the understanding of what the universe is. Physics and metaphysics, biology and moral philosophy join together in Nagel’s vision of a distant, eventually unified-field theory of the universe, of existence. His cosmic, overarching vision is remarkably anthropocentric—anchored in an idea of practical progress at a scale of human experience, with human history echoing the history of the universe.

I’m immensely sympathetic to Nagel’s line of thought (full disclosure: he was my professor for a semester at Princeton in the mid-seventies). It offers, in a vastly more substantial form, a parallel to my own view of movies. When discussion arose here several years ago regarding new trends toward realistic movie-making, I contended, in effect, that everything is real—that the realities that matter in movies are mental constructs, whether emotional or political, and that, therefore, a movie that rigorously represents solely the physical aspects and actions of its characters doesn’t necessarily come any closer to anything like reality, and may even get further from it.

A work of animation, a C.G.I. fantasy, or a film that depicts its characters’ dreams, visions, hallucinations, and inner voices—or that fragments events with montage of images and sounds—may well get to reality more intimately, deeply, or fully. The recent movie that seems best to embody a perspective similar to Nagel’s is Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” with its view of a kind of prehistorical history as related to lived (albeit imagined) experience. (The most famous example is the remarkable scene of C.G.I.-generated dinosaurs discovering a primordial sense of mercy.)

Nagel’s thesis has, I think, similarly radical consequences for philosophy itself. His argument implies that consciousness—indeed, mental life, whether conscious or not—is not atomic but holistic: there is no such thing as a piece or an atom of experience, but, rather, a mind at a given moment is flooded with an incalculable number of perceptions, memories, ideas, judgments, and desires. Even enumerating them in the plural is a little silly, because it implies the ability to isolate them as singular events or things. Therefore, philosophy, in order to account for mental life, will need to turn aside from isolated experiments in logic and argumentation in favor of rough-edged, life-sized chunks—historical events and figures, works of art, artists themselves, cities, countries, languages, human dramas of all sorts, lived or imagined.

Which is to say that, though Nagel doesn’t write about art in “Mind and Cosmos,” the book’s widest implications involve art and how it helps us to understand the world. If Nagel is right, art itself would no longer be merely the scientist’s leisure-time fulfillment but would be (I think, correctly) recognized as a primary mode of coming to grips with the mental and moral essence of the universe. It would be a key source of the very definition of life. Aesthetics will be propelled to the forefront of philosophy as a crucial part of metaphysical biology, and so, the writing and practice of philosophy will come to look more like texts by Nietzsche, with their own built-in aesthetic and subjective components and emphases on historical and practical events. The very beauty of Nagel’s theory—its power to inspire imagination—counts in its favor.